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Mind, Body and Organic Martinis in Miami Beach

At the new Canyon Ranch Miami Beach, the sun shines in at morning meditation.Credit
Alex Quesada for The New York Times

ONCE you went to a spa when you felt tense. Now you feel tense going to a spa.

Is it really right to lie around in sunny Florida, at the opulent Canyon Ranch Miami Beach, getting an oil-drizzle four-handed massage when the grandfatherly grifter Bernie Madoff has left large chunks of Palm Beach and New York — not to mention Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick — tapped out? (Six Degrees of Depression?)

Isn’t it obnoxiously self-regarding to focus on “Your Transformation” — a phrase Canyon Ranch has somehow trademarked — when America has undergone a transformation into a place where vain fripperies and vulgar extravagances are met with a gimlet eye?

Over New Year’s, Paris Hilton garnered worldwide headlines for “callous excess” when she spent nearly $4,000 in a 40-minute shopping spree in Sydney. At Christmas, Kathy Fuld, wife of the Lehman Brothers barbarian Dick Fuld, led the way in “stealth shopping,” asking Hermès sales clerks to put purchases in plain white shopping bags rather than the labeled orange ones. A sheathing practice once reserved for men’s magazine pornography is now used to mask the pornography of spending. And Hollywood makeup artists report that $500 handmade mink eyelashes are definitely out.

With our Ponzi-scheme economy collapsing, can primping be justified? With America so busy detoxifying from its toxic greed, hubris and overreaching, is there still room for the more aesthetic form of detoxifying? Will our depleted nation finally learn the existential lesson that eyebrow plucking can be done at home?

The willowy Barack Obama, the perfect president for an ascetic age, has demonstrated that you can stay supremely fit and eat healthily no matter how crazy your schedule, without a lot of pampering and Sanskrit mumbo jumbo, if you are willing to get up at dawn to exercise and eschew fattening foods — even, as his daughter Sasha pointed out with amazement, ice cream.

Besides, in the 21st-century Depression, toxifying may be the tonic we need. The Washington Post’s New Year’s “Out-In” list predicted that “drinking like ‘Mad Men’ ” will be the rage in 2009.

Americans are suffering from “luxury shame,” as it’s called, sacrificing overpriced indulgences and spurning high-end brand names, trying belatedly to channel the thriftiness and prudence of the last generation that endured an economic collapse.

My mom always warned me that there was something immoral about a $5 cup of coffee, a $1.75 bottle of water, a $27 fifth of bourbon and a $40 candle. I’m sure the $500 pizhichil massage (without tip) offered by Canyon Ranch would have appalled her. It made my friend Alessandra, who had the “body ritual,” featuring two masseuses squeezing pieces of linen dipped in “medicinal oil” all over her body for 80 minutes, cringe a bit as well. “I felt like a fat Mafioso being serviced by Thai hookers,” she confessed afterward.

The shhhhh is in shopping, as The Times of London put it. Is the ax falling on extravagant relaxing?

To find out if spa guilt is rampant, Alessandra and I spent a long weekend at the new Canyon Ranch in the old Carillon Hotel in Miami Beach, which bills itself as the first condo, luxury hotel and wellness spa “of its kind!”

In December, the spa had been open a few weeks and was offering most, but not all, of the services it will eventually have. It was pretty deserted, and Miami itself had a weird deserted feel as well, with cab drivers grousing that business in this normally peak time was at a nadir.

It was hard to tell if the paucity of guests and the unsure, nervous attitude that floated through the place were due to the soft opening or the jolt of hard times. Staff members privately fretted about the economy and about whether, amid all the bling-y temptations and splashy spas of Miami, people would flock to — or even fathom — the lofty Canyon Ranch philosophy about utilizing your internal energy, unleashing your potential, balancing your dosha and expanding your chi to find “the most amazing you.”

I overheard one of the managers, who was discussing the issue of whether people would pay for health spas in this economy, sum it up fortune-cookie style to a colleague: “The first half of your life, you spend your health to get your money; the second half, you spend your money to get your health.”

I wondered if spas were a bit out of date. Shouldn’t they be offering more cutting-edge fare than the usual back rubs, rock-wall basics and lectures on “The Secret to Perfect Posture” and “Understanding Chakras”? What about face transplants instead of face cleansing? Social climbing in the Obama era rather than rock-wall climbing? Cure you of a man rather than a manicure?

Nevertheless, it was nice to have the glamorous spa largely to ourselves. Perched on the ocean, with gorgeous shimmering mosaic designs, gentle lighting, sumptuous rooms, a sybaritic spa, a state-of-the-art gym overlooking the blue-green water, an exceptionally charming group of exercise instructors, delicious (if suspiciously salty-tasting) food, and raspberry-vodka-and-hibiscus-tea martinis on the room service menu, this instantly ranked as the most alluring — if not slimming — spa I’d ever been to.

It’s the only Canyon Ranch that allows alcohol, even though the snazzy wine list comes with an earnest philosophy entitled “Canyon Ranch Beverage.”

“Our beverage offerings are reflective of our beliefs,” the drinks menu intones. “Research indicates that alcohol, when consumed in moderation, can help people live long and well.” Al Gore will be happy to know that their alcoholic beverages are better for the environment: “100% organic spirits and beer, along with sustainable, organic and biodynamic wines free of artificial pesticides and fertilizers.”

While you may like your red wine green, the real rationale for having alcohol at this spa is surely that the owners figure that, because this Canyon Ranch is in the heart of sybaritic Miami Beach and not out in the remote countryside like the other Canyon Ranches in Arizona and the Berkshires, it might be better, because, as Oscar Wilde put it, “I can avoid everything except temptation.”

They say they want to merge “Miami style with natural tranquillity.” But that seems like an impossible contradiction since the whole point of Miami is to salsa and jangle, not to do stress-reducing pranayama breathing techniques or go on “Intention Walks” to “enjoy and notice all that is around you.”

That explains why, even in this new age of austerity, this is the least ascetic spa ever. The menu is chockablock with yummy items denied at stricter retreats: mochaccinos and macchiatos, coffee cake, banana bread, veal bacon, chicken sausage patties, breakfast potatoes, Caribbean French toast, banana nut pancakes. No need to desert desserts; the charming cafe has plates of scones and muffins and cookies out on the counter all day. Still, it’s all so organic that the smoothies come with cardboard straws.

The five-part breakdown of every morsel ingested — how many calories and how many grams of carbs, protein, fat and fiber each item contains — give fair warning that, unless you apply your own rigorous self-discipline, you probably won’t be coming home from this spa any thinner. (Oatmeal raisin cookies weigh in at 75 calories apiece, with 13-1-2-1 grams; chocolate chip at 86, 13-1-3-1, and brownies at 169, 30-2-5-1.)

Sprinkled with the senior citizens starting to buy the Canyon Ranch condos next door to the hotel (with 90 percent already sold), the exercise classes sometimes have the feel of a retirement community. This might bother those interested in turbo-charged workouts, but I liked it. It was a refreshing change to be the most agile skeleton-stretcher in a qi gong class that was a fusion of yoga and martial arts, a sorty angry yoga.

I tried to get in the Canyon Ranch frame of mind. (In the literature, they like to italicize Canyon Ranch, as though New Age music were playing.)

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I went to a lecture called “Let Me See Your Tongue,” with Jim Rohr, an attractive young expert on Chinese medicine. He explained how the color, coating, shape and moisture of the tongue can give signals about the health of the spleen, kidney and other organs.

It was terrifying. “Blue and purple tongues,” he explained, “are not good for anything.” Same with white, yellow, gray or black tongues, or thick and greasy tongues, or swollen, cracked, deviated, flaccid, sticky and tooth-marked tongues, or quivering tongues, which signify a yin deficiency or chi stagnation. We had a brief discussion on the wonder of Gene Simmons. The only other person in the room, a dental hygienist, asked Mr. Rohr to examine our tongues. We stuck them out. “Nothing jumps out about them,” he reassured us. “They’re not ‘Oh my God!’ tongues.”

In meditation class, I found myself in deep reflection on more entertaining things to do in Miami. Overhearing exercise instructors talking about some concerts and dance clubs they’d been to, I was overcome by the temptation to escape from my odyssey of self-discovery. All the tasty options at the spa had created a slippery slope, making me hungry for even more options. Mere moments away, all of Miami’s sparkle awaited.

I’d seen someone execute a daring escape from a spa once. Many years ago, when she was single, Nicole Miller, the pretty red-headed clothing designer, had broken out one night from the puritanical Golden Door in Escondido, Calif., and shown up the next morning with a cute guy and a satisfied smile.

At some spas, going AWOL produces a Mother Superior scowl from management. Here, the easygoing staff seems to expect it, even enable it. There’s a hair salon that will wash the massage oil out of your hair, give you a great blow dry and reasonably priced sun streaks, and send you on your way out into the warm night with some cheap dangly earrings.

I called the only person I knew in Miami and asked him to bust us out of there on Saturday night. Fortunately, he was chief of police, my pal John Timoney, so the great escape from Canyon Ranch went flawlessly in his white getaway S.U.V.

Chief Timoney took us over to the most over-the-top spot in this over-the-top city: the leopard-skin-swathed, stained-glass-filled, Medusa-head-branded Versace mansion, a testament to what one man accomplished by reducing antiquity to a throw pillow.

The mansion, Casa Casuarina, had been turned into a private club but is now open to the public, with a restaurant on its patio that started out in September, and tours of the mannerist upstairs suites. We had a drink in the ornate bar with the owner, Peter Loftin, a mountain of Southern charm, a retired telecommunications mogul who bought the house for $19 million in 2000. Then we ate a sampling from the kitchen: a mound of succulent Kobe beef, fried pork belly, sea scallops with osetra caviar, black grouper, blue prawns cooked at the table on a salt block, foie gras with a riesling-pineapple-coriander emulsion and Meyer lemon tart and crushed amaretti mousse with vanilla-bean meringue, washed down by Champagne (Krug, Clos de Ambonnay 1995), at one of the outdoor tables under a tent by the elaborately tiled pool.

We met the talented chef, Dale Ray, toured the ornate guest suites (with 10-by-9-foot beds) and watched from the balcony as tourists drove by on Ocean Drive, still taking their ghoulish memento photos of the spot outside where Gianni Versace died after he was shot by the drifter serial killer Andrew Cunanan.

As at the spa, it was hard to tell if the lack of a crowd signified that tourists just don’t know this ravishingly rococo spot is open or if real austerity abhors faux antiquity.

Beefed up, literally, I waddled back to Canyon Ranch, more in need of the relatively spartan life than ever. I had jasmine oil poured on my third eye. I sprawled in heated chaise longues by the hydrospa. I tested the array of sound, smell and light caverns in the ladies’ room: an igloo, a crystal sauna, a scented sauna called an “herbal laconium” and “experimental” showers in the spa, including Cool Fog, Tropical Rain and Caribbean Storm (in which parrots squawk and the lights go on and off imitating lightning).

I had a massage where a woman walked on my back while holding on to rails in the ceiling — not relaxing — and another where I was rubbed down by a cute young Latino massage therapist wielding a mushroom-shaped ball wrapped in linen.

After three days, I felt good but certainly not purified or even streamlined. When I thought about the Canyon Ranch motto, the Power of Possibility (also, improbably, trademarked), it infused me with the powerful possibility of hitting the town once more before we left.

Alessandra and I headed off to Joe Allen, with the aqua neon sign gleaming out front and the little silver surfers decorating the walls inside. We sat at the bar, behind a row of vintage Deco cocktail shakers, and shared a martini with lots of olives — what Frank Sinatra would dismissively call a salad — and a heaping plate of French fries.

I felt my anxiety ebbing. 401(k) values come and go. Wealth distribution can be as unfair and upsetting as fat distribution. But there will always be French fries.

WELLNESS AND SWELLNESS

GETTING THERE

Miami International Airport is served by most major airlines, with several, including American, Continental and Delta, providing nonstop service from New York. In February, round-trip fares start at about $170, based on a recent Internet search. A taxi ride from the airport to Miami Beach costs $33, not including tip, for a roughly 25-minute ride. Canyon Ranch Miami Beach can arrange for transportation to and from the airport, but it is not free, as it is at its other two locations.

WHERE TO STAY

Canyon Ranch Miami Beach, 6801 Collins Avenue; (305) 514-7000; www.canyonranch.com. A 950-square-foot, one-bedroom Intracoastal suite starts at $350 a night; a 920-square-foot poolside suite with one king bed starts at $450; a 1,200-square-foot oceanfront suite with two bedrooms starts at $1,000. Rates include classes like yoga and kinesis movement and access to the Aquavana Experience (Crystal Steam Room, HydroSpa and Igloo, among other features). Meals are not included in the room rates. Canyon Ranch Miami Beach is the first of the company’s three locations to offer alcohol — or, as they call it, “organic spirits.” A three-night stay booked before Jan. 31 includes a $300 credit toward spa treatments, which are $140 to $500 for a massage and $150 to $275 for a facial.

An article on Jan. 18 about the new Canyon Ranch spa in Miami Beach misstated, at one point, the name of the street where Casa Casuarina (the former Versace Mansion) is located. As the article noted elsewhere, it is Ocean Drive, not Ocean Avenue.